1964
1963 1964 1965 Events * Herbert Marcuse publishes One-Dimensional Man. * Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb released. * Sidney Lumet's Fail Safe is released. * 24th Amendment abolishes the poll tax. * Dr. Timothy Leary is dismissed from Harvard. * U.S. Army begins using superhallucinogen BZ gas in Vietnam. * China's population is 704.99 million. * Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser convenes the first Arab summit. * Future corrupt Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham receives his bachelor's degree from the University of Missouri. * Expat New Yorker Howard Zinn publishes SNCC: The New Abolitionist. * Expat Missourian Robert A. Heinlein publishes The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. * Militant Tendency established in Britain. * Vermont abolishes the death penalty. Timeline January * January: Bob Moses and COFO (Council of Federated Organizations) announce the Mississippi Summer Project to register Blacks to vote. * January 8: U.S. Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson announces the War on Poverty. * January 9: Anti-U.S. rioting in the Panama Canal Zone leaves 21 Panamanians and three U.S. soldiers died. * January 10: Panama breaks ties with U.S. and demands revision of the canal treaty. * January 30: The 24th Amendment is added to the Constitution. February * February: Japanese Finance Minister Tanaka Kakuei establishes the Pollution Prevention Service Corporation (Kogai Boshi Jigyodan) to subsidize private industry investment in pollution abatement. * February 10: U.S. Pres. Lyndon Baines Johnson signs the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. * February 10: U.S. House of Representatives passes a final version of the Civil Rights Act. * February 12: Darwin Day * February 15: Founding meeting of the White Knights of the Klu Klux Klan of Mississippi. * February 17: 18 French troops intervene in Gabon to rescue the president and restore him to power. French efficiency in action! * February 22: Persian Gulf Buoy Incident begins as a ship from the Iranian Ministry of Commerce places a buoy within the territorial waters of Abu Musa. The Arab press responds that the move is a provocation. March * March: Malcolm X defects from the Nation of Islam. * March 9: U.S. Sec. of Defense Robert McNamara and South Vietnamese Premier and Maj. Gen. Nguyen Khanh tour countryside in South Vietnam. * March 13: Kitty Genovese is murdered in Queens, New York. April * April 7: IBM announces the System/360 line of 24-bit mainframe computers. Today's IBM mainframes can still run software written for the System/360. * April 9: First Greater London Council election. * April 22: British businessman Greville Wynne, held by the Soviet Union since 1963 on charges of spying for the United States and Britain, is exchanged on the Glienicke Bridge for Soviet intelligence officer Konon Molody (Gordon Arnold Lonsdale) who was imprisoned by the British since 1961 as head of the Portland Spy Ring. * April 24: KKK burns crosses at 61 separate locations across Mississippi. May * May 28: At the request of Egyptian Pres. Gamel Abdul Nasser Arab League announces the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) under the leadership of Ahmad Shuqeiri. * May 30: Michael Schwerner and James Chaney speak at Mt. Zion Methodist Church in Neshoba County, urging its congregation to register. June * June: Malcolm X organizes the Organization of Afro-American Unity. * June 12: Anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela receives a life sentence for "sabotage" from a court in South Africa. * June 14: Andy Goodman and other student volunteers attend training session for Summer Project volunteers in Oxford, Ohio. Also in attendence are CORE members Schwerner and Chaney. * June 16: Armed Klansmen assault the leaders of Mt. Zion Church. * June 17: Klansmen burn Mt. Zion Church. (It will be one of twenty black churches in Mississippi to be firebombed in the summer of 1964. FBI begins investigation into church bombing codenamed "MIBURN", for "Mississippi burning.") * June 20: France formally withdraws from NATO, but it remains part of NATO by secret agreement. * June 20: Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and James Goodman drive from Ohio to the CORE office in Meridian, Mississippi. * June 20: General William Westmoreland (later nicknamed "Waste-More-land") becomes the new chief of U.S. forces in Vietnam. * June 21: Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and James Goodman drive to site of a burned church in Neshoba County. On their way back to Meridian, MS they are arrested by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price and taken to the county jail in Philadelphia, MS. In a conspiracy with local Klansmen, Price releases the three civil rights activists from jail at 10:00 pm. The unarmed civil rights workers' station wagon is overtaken on a rural road, the three are beaten and shot. Their bodies buried in an earthen dam. * June 23: Henry Cabot Lodge is replaced by Maxwell Taylor as U.S. envoy to South Vietnam. * June 14: James Farmer, John Lewis, and Dick Gregory meet with Neshoba County official in Philadelphia. July * July 2: Lyndon Johnson signs the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Segregation is now abolished in the United States. * July 10: J. Edgar Hoover arrives in Jackson to open a Mississippi office of the FBI. August * August 2: Vietnamese forces may or may not have attacked the U.S. Destroyer (USS Maddox) in what is to become known as the Gulf of Tonkin incident. * August 4: LBJ orders retaliation with conventional weapons for the "attack" on August 2. * August 4: The bodies of civil rights workers Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, are found near Philadelphia, Mississippi. * August 5: Secretary of Defense McNamara announced that the U.S. was rushing miltiary forces to Southeast Asia to reinforce its presence there. * August 5: First retaliatory U.S. air strikes against North Vietnam. * August 6: Gutsy Senator Wayne Morse denounces the Tonkin Gulf Resolution as a "predated declaration of war" and saying that the U.S. was the real "provacateur" in the event. Senator Morse and Senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska are the only Senators to vote against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which passes 88 to 2 in the U.S. Senate. The U.S. House of Representatives passes it 416 to 0. * August 7: The United States begins large scale military deployments in Vietnam. * August 7: Robert Kennedy announces that he is considering running for the U.S. Senate in New York. * August 12: Mississippi's white segregationist Democratic Governor Paul B. Johnson tells an all white Dixiecrat audience that LBJ had personally promised him that the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegates would not be seated as delegates in the party's national nominating convention. * August 16: In an act of civil disobedience against pot prohibition, Haight-Ashbury resident Lowell Eggemeier walks into San Francisco police station, lights a joint, and says, "Arrest me." * August 25: Joanne Whalley, future star of the 1989 film Scandal about the Profumo Affair, is born in Romiley, in Cheshire, England. * August 28: Bob Dylan introduces the Beatles to marijuana in their suite at the Delomonico Hotel in New York. September * September 8: First Star Trek episode is broadcast. * September 14: University of California, Berkeley officials announce new policy prohibiting political action at the campus entrance at Bancroft Way and Telegraph. * September 30: Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley begins with a protest march by philosophy graduate student Mario Savio. October * October 15: British General Election. Labour Party wins 319 seats (+59), Conservative Party wins 304 seats (-61) and Liberal Party wins 9 seats (+3). * October 16: China detonates "596", its first nuclear device, with a yield of 22Kt. November * November 1: NLF attacks Bien Hoa airport at Saigon. * November 6: Victor Sorge is posthumously named a Hero of the Soviet Union. December * December 9: Che Guevara is in New York City to speak at the United Nations, and then embarks on a three month visit to Africa.\ * December 24: U.S. military headquarters in Saigon is bombed; 2 officers die.